Canada has placed its first vaccinated order, but does not expect a ‘silver bullet’

For Canadians eager for an impetus against the coronavirus, this week brought both optimism and words of sober caution.

The federal government on Wednesday announced the first of many major offers to buy vaccines from two US-based multinational pharmaceutical companies: Pfizer and Moderna.

There will be “millions” of doses, said Anita Anand, the cabinet minister responsible for the deal, at a news conference. She did not provide any further details. But she and another cabinet minister said the government was negotiating deals with other fax makers, including some in Canada.

The catch in all this is that neither Pfizer nor Moderna, nor anyone else, actually has a proven vaccine. The situation is similar to what happened to the Salk polio vaccine in the mid-fifties. When I wrote in last week’s newsletter to speed up that vaccine, I gambled and placed a bulk order to begin production at Connaught Laboratories before studies on patients proved it to be safe and effective.

Connaught, which played a crucial role in bringing the Salk vaccine into production, was then the only game in Canada. This time, many more companies are trying to get the vaccine for coronavirus. The World Health Organization counts 28 possible vaccines that are currently being investigated. Many more, including some Canadian candidates, are in earlier stages.

To guide the purchase of faxes, as well as its investments in Canadian faxes and fax production, the federal government has approached a panel of experts with backgrounds in science, medicine, public health, and fax manufacturing.

As bets go, choosing Pfizer and Moderna is relatively conservative. Late last month, both companies began the first large-scale studies of their candidate faxes in the United States.

[Read: Moderna and Pfizer Begin Late-Stage Vaccine Trials]

Assuming all goes well, Ms. Anand said, the first deliveries should appear next year.

But earlier this week, Dr Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief of public health, warned against too many assumptions about the power of vaccination to end the current pandemic.

At this point, she said, faxes are not “the solution to the silver bullet.”

She said that many vaccines for other viruses only reduce the effects of infection; they do not prevent it.

As a result, she said, public health officials are working on the assumption that many of the measures now in place will be up for two years.

Reggie Lo, a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph focusing on vaccine development, told me this week that the first candidates for vaccine, who may not be the most effective, may be by the end of the year. appearing, but imposing scaled-up billions on their production will be a formidable challenge.

He also claims that, with the exception of smallpox, other deadly viruses have not been removed for decades from vaccination.

“The public needs to ‘deal with this forever,'” he said. Lo in an email. “Anyone who thinks the epidemic is over with the development of a vaccine has not understood the enormity of the problem.”

Last week’s newsletter asked former Prime Minister Paul Martin to call me. His father, also Paul Martin, was, as Federal Minister of Health, the key player in the Canadian invasion and participation in the development of the Salk vaccine.

The younger Mr. Martin, who as a child was infected with polio, had a memory of that time capturing the uncertainty about vaccines.

His father, he said, was most favorable at home. But one afternoon in 1955, when Mr. Martinus was going to his library, his father was unusually distracted and testy. He was told he would go to his mother.

From them, Mr. Martin learned that his father had to deal with perhaps the most difficult decision of his life: whether or not he would continue with plans to vaccinate Canada. A batch of faxes made by Cutter Laboratories, an American company, was found to be defective and affected 40,000 children. About 200 of them were left paralyzed, and 10 died.

As a result, the United States stopped polio vaccination for several months, a decision that led to infections, deaths and paralysis. Finally, the older Mr. Martin was convinced that Connaught’s vaccine was safe, and Canada continued its impetus without incident.

The stakes, if anything, are now greater because the world is rushing to produce a vaccine for coronavirus. We can all be called upon to have patience and realistic expectations.

Trans Canada

A Windsor, Ontario resident, Ian Austen was raised in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has been reporting on Canada for the past 16 years for The New York Times. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

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